


you said, we were born with nothing

by The-Immortal-Moon (LunaKat)



Series: The Fault In His Automail (EdWin Week 2020) [4]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Arson, EdWin Week 2020, F/M, Guilt, Hurt No Comfort, Pre-Relationship, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:41:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24003760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/The-Immortal-Moon
Summary: For EdWin Week 2020. Day 4: BurnThis isn’t just anending. This is ano going back.
Relationships: Edward Elric & Winry Rockbell
Series: The Fault In His Automail (EdWin Week 2020) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1726453
Comments: 16
Kudos: 16





	you said, we were born with nothing

Sunsets symbolize endings. You wait until the last rays of daylight have faded before you move.

This isn’t just an _ending_. This is a _no going back_.

Al entertained the notion of rescuing childhood valuables before setting the sparks, but neither of you end up going inside. You just can’t—it’s the place where Mom died twice over, where your old selves perished, a mausoleum of all that you’ve ever lost. It’s bad enough that you have both sinned against nature, and that you will be sinning again in order to regain Al’s body, but you don’t want to tack a second instance of _disturbing the dead_ onto your short-but-ever-growing list of mistakes.

The air is mild with the transition between summer and autumn, crisp with the approaching promise of canopies bursting into brilliant color. Fire dances coyly at the end of the torch, blackening the wood like spreading gangrene. Dry heat tickles at your cheek, paints your face vermillion with resolve. When you inhale, the smoke slides into the recesses of your lungs.

Without a word, you dip the torch towards one bone-white corner of your house. The contact that is made reminds you of a kiss.

It takes only a blink and a breath and a heartbeat before a flaming tongue laps at the paint.

You draw back, shivering from the beesting-tang of destruction on your tongue. Pain courting catharsis. Fearfully, you think that you could get used to it.

A creak of metal. Orange glitters, muted, in your little brother’s new cold body. Perhaps you already are.

“Brother,” Al intones.

You look over your shoulder. Shadows move somewhere beyond the reach of the amber firelight. Silhouettes traveling the footpath. One shrimpy, one canine, and one willowy and lean.

This is another reason why you wanted to go at night. This is what you were trying to avoid.

By the time they crest the hill, the kiss of fire has stretched into a long, burning line. The spread is somehow both faster and slower than you expected, because it creeps up like an ivy vine instead of out like a blooming flower. When the flames climb ever-higher, thicken the air with hellfire heat, there is something almost ambitious in it. Fleetingly, you wonder if the fire is trying to reach for the zenith of the roof first before it dares to settle along the sheer width of the walls—but you banish such a notion from your mind, because despite what you seek, you are an alchemist and not a philosopher.

Granny’s glasses capture orange-yellow flashes as she observes the damage. Her pipe is absent from her mouth, even though the slow, lazy curl of tobacco smoke wouldn’t be remiss. “So you’re really going through with this, boys?”

Even though she’s the one who speaks, it’s Winry you find yourself looking at. As the heat grows and the air wavers glowing orange, her eyes stand out as vividly blue. Amber paints bold, harsh strokes across the dismay of her expression, the sorrow wrought in milky face. Firelight pinpricks dance in her irises like the slow swirl of a golden galaxy. Her hair spills daylight-warm down her shoulders, mussed slightly from tossing and turning in a pillow, from worrying over you. Those sapphire eyes cling to your face, searching, seeking, wanting.

Ashamed, you turn away. You don’t want her to see you highlighted by the flames. “Yeah.” The air crackles. Cracks. Something breaking. “No going back.”

Paint peels, blackens around the borders of the fire’s siege. Its ambition has finally taken root in arrogance as it spreads out in addition to up. An army taking siege of the whole world. Smoke twists into the sky like a warning signal. As sparks spill into the night in stuttering bursts and the heat grows viscous in your throat, you find yourself having to back away.

You turn on your heel, the torch gripped tight in your metal hand. This isn’t fast enough.

Al follows you as you march off to another corner. Winry does, too. You don’t know why. This has nothing do with her. Granny remains in place, neither condoning nor condemning, while Den sits there with a disapproving whine in his throat. But Winry follows at a respectful distance, her eyes blue-blue-blue against the red-orange-yellow.

Again, you dip the torch to a white corner. Again, the flame catches. You look at her, silent, waiting for her to object. You know she will.

She doesn’t. She just looks at you without blinking.

Again, you turn away.

This is exactly why you didn’t want her here. Why you didn’t want _them_ here. The Rockbells have done _everything_ for you and Al for as long as you can remember, have given you love and comfort and security. Everything you could have ever wanted, everything you could have ever _needed_. They have given you all the tools to help you escape your grief, your obsession, your hubris.

But you didn’t take it.

They gave you a home, and you didn’t take it.

You wonder if Winry hates you for being so ungrateful. You wonder if she blames herself for not being good enough.

You don’t know which is worse.

There is an apology in your mouth, something you have been rolling around against your tongue like a hard, bitter berry since the day you woke up in their infirmary. It wouldn’t be enough, but you could offer it to the night air, if only so that the opportunity exists for it to be rejected or accepted.

There is an apology in your mouth, but destruction’s taste overpowers it.

If you can’t accept a home when it is freely offered to you, then you sure as hell don’t deserve the one you have.

Firelight blazes against your corneas to the point of painful. Crackling fills the air like a defective heartbeat, like a life giving its last stuttering death-throes before giving out. Sparks flood the night in bursting fits, lingering just long enough to remind you of starlight smattered against the heavens before abruptly winking out. Heat beats against his face as though it were a tactile thing, a thick and oppressive blanket not unlike the comforters that you and Al used to make pillow forts out of. At some point when you didn’t notice, the fire’s ambition succeeded, and it was amble to ascend the summit of the chimney and crow its victory.

Wooden foundations groan. Glass in the windows melt. Roof shingles buckle. Flames lick at the leaves of the apple tree, tasting.

Al stays at your side. Winry does too, but at a distance.

You are grateful for the roar of the fire. Silence would be unbearable.

In an act of finality, you take the torch that served as your ignition point and toss it haphazardly towards the inferno. It clatters against a wall, tumbles heedlessly to the ground. But the fire does not let it escape. Immediately, the wooden entirety of it is seized by scorch marks, turns from brown to black faster than you can blink. Once a tragedy takes hold, nobody ever escapes it.

There are eyes on you. Granny’s, grim and grieving. Den’s, wide and worried. Al’s, solemn and soulfire.

Winry does not look at you.

She looks at the house, lips slightly parted, as though caught on an aborted word of parting. Even though she’s right there, close-but-not, you find yourself unable to read her expression. Ochre light washes across her face until all you can see if flame and inferno, goodbye and no going back.

Her eyes are glassy, shining wet. Red-amber light sparkles against the sapphire of her irises, shimmers bright against the white of her sclera. That same shimmer suddenly spills over, traces a long stripe down the darkened flush of her right cheek. It turns vermillion before your eyes, molten with heat and sorrow.

Your mouth parts.

There are so many things you could say, then. You want to tell her it isn’t her fault you weren’t able to integrate yourself into her life like you know she wanted. You want to tell her that this isn’t necessary _goodbye_ so much as it is _no going back_ , because you still need someone to tune up your prosthetics. You want to tell her that the human body isn’t capable of producing enough tears to smother the fire swallowing up the mausoleum of your broken childhood. You want to tell her that she didn’t have to come, you didn’t want her to see this, because you knew she would cry like this and you wanted to spare her that, at least. You want to tell her that you’ll never, ever be able to pay her back for everything she’s done for you, picking you up and piecing you back together and giving you a leg so you walk and an arm so you can reach. You want to tell her that all the love and care she put into your automail can never be returned through Equivalent Exchange and you feel terrible for it, because you take and take and take _so much_ , you have been destroying longer than you can remember even when you don’t mean it, and you don’t know how to stop.

You want to tell her that you would stay, if you could—that you _want_ to, because all you have ever really wanted is a place to call home that actually fits and feels like home—but this comes first.

Instead you just smile, sad and slow, because here you are, breaking promises you haven’t even made yet. “What are you crying for, Winry?”

In the end, she never does answer you. She doesn’t need to.

You can still taste destruction on your tongue.

**Author's Note:**

> Anybody remember that 2019 New Year's Resolution I made to write an FMA fic for every month? 'Cause I do, and boy has it been haunting me until now. This is just the kick in the pants I needed to finish.
> 
> Title inspired by the lyrics of "What We Lost In The Fire" by Bastille (Album: Bad Blood)


End file.
